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I try to keep my child-free friends in my life, but it rarely works

Not everyone wants to hear about the challenges of breastfeeding, the sleepless nights of being a new parent.

Parents may have to make adjustments to their friendships after having a baby, and not everyone makes the cut. (dreamstime)

By Amy KleinThe Washington Post

Sat., Aug. 20, 2016

“What’s going on?” my best friend, Jeff, asks. We talk on the phone daily since I left Los Angeles for New York seven years ago to find a husband. Today, I tell him how I feel stuck with my writing, overwhelmed by deadlines and distant from said hubby. The one thing we don’t discuss? The baby.

Unless she’s with me, I don’t talk to Jeff about my 1-year-old. It’s not that he isn’t ecstatic for me that I finally had a child. God knows, he probably heard me cry about my years of infertility more than my husband, for whom I’ve always tried to stay upbeat.

It’s just that, as a gay polyamorous man — Jeff has a husband, a boyfriend and a few other lovers — he is rather indifferent to the particulars of parenting. A lot of my friends are — that’s what happens when you get hitched after 40.

I get it. For a long time, I wasn’t sure I wanted kids. Raised as an Orthodox Jew, I was expected to marry and procreate by the time I was out of college. But a devout and domestic life seemed like a trap. Why give up my carefree lifestyle? Especially since I feared I would mess up motherhood as badly as my own uninvolved parents had.

It was only in my late 30s — when the nights grew long and lonely and I became an aunt — that I wondered what it would be like to have a child. Craving my nieces’ company, filling their library with books, babysitting whenever I could, I was learning how much more capable I was than my own unprepared parents. They had been in their early 20s and not in love when they started having four kids. They divorced 30 years later.

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So, yes, I do understand what it’s like not having kids. I understand my long-married pal who “played Russian Roulette” with her birth control, figuring that, if it happened, it happened. (It didn’t.) I felt for my college buddy who was so traumatized by his childhood that he had no desire to procreate. And of course I sympathize with all my gorgeous girlfriends who haven’t met the right man yet, or the ones who did too late to make motherhood possible.

I could have been any of them. That’s why I’m so keen to keep them in my life, even though I’m a parent now.

Sure, I have mom friends. Not from those awkward hospital support groups or Mommy and Me yoga — just friends I already had who happened to have kids at the same time. But I want my entire posse the ones who knew me when I never thought I’d meet someone, who were wingmen at those dreadful singles parties, and who listened to my crazy JDate stories. (It’s hard to believe we had to read and write entire profiles instead of simply swiping!)

I did have to make some adjustments to keep these people in my life. Not everyone wants to hear about the challenges of breastfeeding, the sleepless nights of raising a newborn or the hysterical contents of my daughter’s diaper after she eats corn. “You’re really missing out” is something you’ll never hear me say. Mostly because I recognize that parenthood isn’t for everyone.

And it takes sacrifice on their part, too, to know that I can’t do late-night excursions anymore, that date-night out requires finagling babysitting logistics and forking over quite a bit of cash. And sometimes the baby needs to come along.

Not everyone has made the cut.

When I was pregnant, a close single friend picked a fight with me over something I found trivial, and we fell out of touch. It could have been that me having a husband and baby was just too much for her.

Another couple became so gleefully child-free — the types who post GIFs about how they’re sleeping late with the dog — that we’ve had trouble connecting now that I’m a parent. When we’re together, I’m so nervous about being one of those people who talks only about my kid that I can hardly think of anything to say at all.

I’d tried to do the same thing when I got engaged. I tried to prove to my single friends that I was the same I’d always been. But marriage did change me. And motherhood has, too. For the better! I put others first, I’m (a little) less self-involved ... and I’m probably more boring. Especially to my child-free friends.

So maybe I should go ahead and join that Mommy and Me yoga class and stop trying to keep my old pals around.

I can always reconnect with them in about 18 years.

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